And on Monday, SolarCity said it had formed a committee of
independent directors to evaluate the deal.

That is because Musk is the largest single shareholder of both
companies and the chairman of SolarCity.

Holy conflict of interest!

Actually, Musk and Rive have said they will recuse themselves
from voting on the deal.

Anyway, SolarCity is a $3 billion bite for Tesla in an all-stock
transaction that would add — brace yourself — over $3 billion in
debt to Tesla's balance sheet.

If this looks like a SolarCity bailout — the company has seen its
market cap, now $2.25 billion, sawed in half since last year —
then that's because it is.

The deal might look outwardly vexing, and much of
the analysis has suggested that Tesla is doing something
wrong here, but it's not. It's actually following
through on promises that Musk has made over and over for the past
half decade.

If you've been paying attention, then you could have seen
this one coming, though you probably thought Tesla and SolarCity
would become closer partners and not that Tesla would take
charge.

So why is Tesla doing this?

It certainly doesn't seem to be to enhance shareholder value.
Tesla stock dived when the news broke.

What shareholder value?

But it has never been clear that Tesla cares much about
shareholder value.

Rather than please investors or vindicate the ratings and target
prices of Wall Street analysts, the electric-car maker is playing
a longer game. The stock just helps it get there by providing a
way to raise capital, as it did recently and also last year, and
to be used as a form of super currency to sustain Musk's vision
of a world freed from fossil-fuel dependency.

Tesla has lost billions of
dollars in market cap.Screenshot via
Google Finance

SolarCity is integral to that vision, even if it's Musk's most
under-the-radar interest — it's hard to compete with the car of
the future and a SpaceX mission to Mars.

And that's what everybody is missing here.

With this bid, Tesla is trying to become what Musk probably
wanted it to be all along: an integrated holding company
providing global-warming solutions.

If the SolarCity deal goes through, then Tesla will be a
carmaker; a battery maker, thanks to the Gigafactory being built
in Nevada; an energy storage company, thanks to Tesla Energy,
unveiled last year and selling residential battery packs; and a
solar finance firm.

Put all that together under one roof and you get a company that
can sell or lease you a zero-emission, off-the-grid lifestyle.

Plus, Musk rescues his SolarCity investment in the process. But
there's nothing surprising here in the master plan. Musk has
always thought of the companies he's involved with as a single
mega investment. It makes sense to use the stock of one to keep
another one going.

Yes, all that debt could eventually be a major problem for Tesla.
It is already burning cash like crazy as it tries to go from
building 50,000 cars a year in 2015 to building 500,000 annually
by 2018. And SolarCity is incinerating cash.

So that debt load that Tesla would be taking on isn't going
anywhere. Shareholders could rightly accuse Musk of hanging a $3
billion anchor around Tesla's neck.

Of course, shareholders could also vote against the deal, or if
they don't think loading Tesla up with another company's debt is
a good idea, then they can sell their shares.

If Tesla can really save the world, then from Musk's perspective,
taking on all that debt has been worth it.